Procol Harum

Beyond
the Pale

Procol Harum - Live at Ledreborg Castle (DVD)

Liner note by Roland from BtP

‘Ordine cuncta vigent’

Forty kilometres west of the Danish capital, Copenhagen, lies the little town of
Lejre (pop. 3,000), seat of the pre-Viking kings, both historical and legendary.
With its Stone Age villages and ship burials, the area is visibly steeped in
history: dating from the 1740s, the rococo Palace of
Ledreborg is a relative newcomer. Eight generations of the
Holstein-Ledreborg family have lived here, sculpting and refining a baroque
estate of 4,000 acres: its lime-tree avenue, at 7.3 kilometres, is said to be
the longest in Northern Europe, and runs from the Royal Cathedral city of
Roskilde, through Lejre, up the hill to the Palace courtyard and chapel, ending
at the family grave-mound. In 1994, the Countess Silvia inaugurated an annual
weekend of orchestral concerts in the valley behind the castle. And for 23,000
people, foregathered in August 2006, history was to be made again, with a
world-class rock band at the heart of the music.

Procol Harum
relax in the hospitality tent before their Saturday début, confident in each
other’s musicianship and the magic they are about to unleash. They seem like a
secure family, born over four decades, but unified by their timeless music. Gary
Brooker, voice and piano, the inspirational ‘Commander’ and 39-year constant
amid the mutating line-ups that have coalesced round the remarkable songs he
writes with lyricist Keith Reid; Geoff Whitehorn, first-call guitarist to the
stars, happiest in his Procol context; Mark Brzezicki, drummer from Big Country;
Matt Pegg, with his illustrious bass-playing pedigree; and Josh Phillips,
award-winning TV composer, lately settled on the organ bench after many years’
deputising, and looking forward to playing his first orchestral show with the
band. “It’s like a weird dream,” he confides, “playing arrangements I grew up
with.” As a nine-year-old Josh saw Procol play London with the Royal
Philharmonic Orchestra, the year their gold-selling Edmonton Symphony
album came out.

Procol Harum
first played live with orchestra in 1969 at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival
in Ontario, throwing down the gauntlet that would shortly be taken up by
symphonic dabblers like Deep Purple and The Nice. Thanks to the renown of 1971’s
Live with the Edmonton Symphony record and its lavish studio successor,
Grand Hotel, Procol acquired a reputation for ‘classical’ leanings. Yet
Brooker insists that “our heart is in the blues, with a handful of clever
chords”, and the band has played only eighteen orchestral gigs in their first
forty years,though they’ve been high-profile collaborations with
the likes of the LA Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Hallé.

The Edmonton
recording – for all its eventual success – was famously a nightmare of
last-minute logistic, technical and bureaucratic problems; but 2006’s Danish
shows, ten months in the planning under concert supremo Jens Hofman, take the
Ledreborg family motto Ordine cuncta vigent – ‘sound organising
makes success’ – as their mantra.

Procol
themselves convened, following a six-week break, for two days’ Ledreborg
preparation at Gary Brooker’s barn in rural Surrey. Their previous gigs had been
another castle (Lulworth), Finland’s Puisto Blues festival alongside Buddy Guy,
and a rocking return to the Isle of Wight Festival after thirty-six years.
Rehearsing for an orchestral gig is not a matter of studying scores (though the
band can read when required), rather of “working out what to omit, counting some
bars, and reining yourself in so you don’t go off-piste,” as Geoff puts it. And
there is one complex new piece to learn, partly because Brooker likes to keep
his musicians on their toes, and partly because Procol delight in surprising
their fans.

On Tuesday 15
August the band flew to Copenhagen for an unprecedented three days’ rehearsal
with the RUO, the Danish National Concert Orchestra. “Very seldom do we run into
arrangements of such high quality when speaking of rock bands,” Jens Hofman
commented afterwards. He also praised “Gary Brooker’s commitment, and his very
fruitful collaboration with conductor, David Firman”. Firman’s ‘rock attitude’
delighted Josh: “He plays ‘air orchestra’ the way some fans play air guitar.”
The RUO were not just dot-readers, but played “with real passion and emotion.”
Yet they weren’t all rock-savvy: “What’s this contraption?” asked one player,
glaring at the Leslie cabinet whose rotating horns give the Hammond its
characteristic chorale sound. “I just looked at his viola,” Josh reports, “and
said, ‘Well … what is that contraption?’”

“When I
saw the calibre of microphones they had everywhere, I felt my jaw drop,” said
Procol soundman Graham Ewins. “Even one or two
Neumanns of that quality, you’d be jumping up and down.” By contrast to the
Edmonton experience, the only tears were tears of joy: as the
Radiokoret choir rehearsed A Salty Dog, Procol manager Chris Cooke
recalls, “They sang so well it brought a tear to my eye. But back at the hotel
Gary informed the whole band … and I’ve had no control over them ever since.”

At Thursday
night’s on-site soundcheck Chris noted – amid the neatly-marshalled conurbation
of toilet and catering lorries, technical vans for pictures and sound, wardrobe
and other band-wagons – a tent devoted entirely to chargers for the RUO’s in-ear
monitoring system: Ordine cuncta vigent. His
only worry now was the overcast weather: there was no controlling that either.

On the Friday
all 72 performers transferred to the Ledreborg stage for what they hoped would
be a dry run. Through ‘Beyond the Pale’, Procol’s
unofficial website at www.procolharum.com, Chris Cooke
had invited an international audience of the hard-core fans who had colonised a
former dairy in nearby Lejre for their own music-making (of which more below).
After a fifteen-minute walk through one of the country’s few woodlands this
multilingual mêlée – to whom
Denmark had previously meant only bacon and Hamlet, lager and Lego –
descended into the verdant 120 x 200 metre bowl and settled apprehensively
on the moist grass in front of the stripy pavilion. Many had seen a violent
electric storm sweep Procol from a Los Angeles stage in July 2003: would the
Danish skies hold firm?

‘Sound organising makes success’:
Gary’s HP-109 digital grand, opening the show, instantly proved just how good
that sound-organising was. The staging might resemble a
gigantic Punch’n’Judy tent, but close your eyes and you were in an
acoustically-perfect concert-hall. To accompany a rock band, symphonic
players are typically amplified with mics in an overhead grid, but here the RUO
– eight first violins, six second violins, four each of viola and ’cello, two
each of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone and percussion, three
French horns and three double basses – was close-miked. The choir was also
precisely audible – in English, French, even Latin on two
numbers – thanks to two-dozen hand-held microphones. The sound team mixed
an amazing 100+ channels into a PA system that sounded crystal-clear and
powerful throughout the arena. They also offered Procol Harum such flexible
monitoring that when Matt Pegg asked to hear more ’cello, the answer came back,
“Which player?” All in the band were able to relax, and respond to the beautiful
setting, and the fans.

Though this was principally a
‘tech run’, for the sound team and the eight cameramen, the band gave a terrific
performance. Playing al fresco really suited Mark Brzezicki:
“It lets you open up and play at a typical rock
volume, rather than worrying about being gentle and creating a ‘classical’ mix.
Fresh air is the best soundproofing of all!” TV monitors allowed Mark to watch
the conductor directly behind him: a far cry from the truck wing-mirrors
deployed at Edmonton by his illustrious predecessor, BJ Wilson. The efforts of
Hofman’s whole team – some forty technical and administrative staff were listed
in the programme – had clearly paid off.

Satisfied with the day’s work,
Procol Harum were driven back to their grand Copenhagen hotel, to work on their
“astronomical bar-bill” as Matt put it, and some fine-tuning of the score.
Gary Brooker had remembered one of the RUO percussionists
from his 1990 ballet, Delta, commissioned by Denmark’s Royal Opera
House. “I asked him, ‘Have you got an anvil?’ and he replied, ‘Of course.’” A
dramatic anvil part was duly written into Whaling Stories, and maybe this
hammer-homage placated the thunder-god, Thor: because Saturday dawned fair.

A full house
(12,500) on Saturday was inevitable – the Ledreborg shows have sold out since
1997 – but the profusion of Procol regalia in this attentive, middle-aged
audience testified to Denmark’s enduring love of this fascinating band. And it’s
evidently mutual: over the years Procol have played some sixty gigs (not
counting TV and radio shows) in at least twenty Danish towns. Surprisingly, the
Ledreborg set didn’t include The Emperor’s New Clothes, their only song
with a Hans Christian Andersen title! This home-grown audience was reinforced
with Friday’s fervent core of international ‘Palers’, who were able to provide
more than moral support for Geoff Whitehorn when his 50th Anniversary Fender
Strat developed problems during routine pre-gig restringing. “The locking
tremolo started losing its grip,” he explains. “I had it in bits on the hotel
bed as our transport was waiting below: it was ridiculous.” As they drove out of
Copenhagen, vainly looking out for music shops, Procol rang ahead to ‘Beyond the
Pale’, whose webmasters ensured that a suitable reserve guitar – belonging to
the Palers’ Band – was awaiting them backstage.

Both public shows at Ledreborg
followed the setlist from Friday’s dry run, though the general public got a less
surreal and facetious version of Gary Brooker’s inter-song banter. The
fifteen-song recital covered nine of Procol’s eleven studio albums to date, two
60s’ hit singles, one 90s’ rarity, and a 1982 Brooker solo piece. It was not a
typical festival set, but it was scarcely a typical event: nowhere but
Ledreborg, overlooked by an historic palace, would The Commander have opened a
daylight show with a slow-burner like Grand Hotel, which even starts with
the word ‘Tonight’.

“A lot
of Procol stuff is darkness, doesn’t work in the sun,” he concedes. “We have a
few slow sunset songs, but we stick to the more rocking numbers at daylight
festivals: it’s harder to get the atmosphere of slow ones across – unless it’s a
Procol-friendly crowd like we get in Denmark.” There’s a band-only Grand
Hotel from an earlier Procol line-up among the bonus tracks on the present
DVD (how many of 1974’s earnest young audience also came to Ledreborg?): but
today it’s as lavish and stately as the 1973 studio production. Fires (Which
Burnt Brightly) is a voluptuous descendant of its 1973 Swingled-up
incarnation. “The opportunity is there, inside the songs, for
them to grow,” says Gary. “I’ve always looked forward to hearing them even
bigger than the five-piece can do them, seventy people all playing at the same
time.”

It’s hard to remember that Brooker
is a self-taught arranger, as this sparkling concert unfurls. A Salty Dog
adapts his first, strings-only orchestration from the 1969 album, enriched with
the Latin chant that was first played and recorded by The Gary Brooker Ensemble
at a 1996 church fundraiser. The strings-and-voices Nothing but the Truth
hails from the same occasion.

Whaling Stories is an
Edmonton arrangement: Gary’s orchestral parts, subsequently lost, were
reconstructed by David Firman, listening to the album. Conquistador is
also closely based on the Edmonton version (the largest ensemble to play live on
any hit single?) which Brooker orchestrated on the ’plane to the gig. 1992’s
Edmonton reunion spawned a similarly last-minute up-tempo item: Into the
Flood was arranged on a train! It borrows some Beethoven, some Coronation
Mass from Mozart (“he pinched it from me,” Brooker quips), and a
fiddle-punishing ‘hoedown’ from a Wilson Pickett arrangement by Mathias Weiss,
who played with Gary during Procol’s 80s interregnum, keeping the Brooker / Reid
flame alive on orchestral tours in Germany’s ‘Rock Meets Classic’ concert
series. For that project Gary also orchestrated one of his solo-album
highlights, the neologistically-entitled Symphathy for the
Hard of Hearing, the sole Brooker-only composition in today’s set.

Gary’s witty Butterfly Boys
arrangement appeared first on The Long Goodbye, his 1995 album of
symphonic Procol; likewise this treatment of Simple Sister, in the middle
of which broken melodies of sinuous lyricism get up and wander about “to evoke
the poor misfit” as he puts it. The Long Goodbye album also featured
guest arrangers: today’s Homburg was lavishly orchestrated by Nicholas
Dodd (who told Gary, “I don’t think you’re going to like this, it’s probably
over the top,” so some of the sweetness has apparently “been taken out” for
Ledreborg!); and the wistful minor-key prelude to A Whiter Shade of Pale
was penned by Darryl Way (late of Curved Air). The other ‘outboard’ arrangement
is Something Magic, which retains Mike Lewis’s orchestration from the
eponymous 1976 album. With its frequent changes on over twenty chords, this
piece challenges any notion that “Procol is just a blues band”!

There’s good bluesy work, though,
on The VIP Room, one of two band-only pieces in the programme. Also from
The Well’s on Fire, Procol’s 2003 studio album, comes An Old English
Dream, in which Matt’s MusicMan Stingray 5-string delivers some nice
flourishes, and the band’s trademark Hammond B3 gets to shine. The organ’s
habitual texturing work is reduced when an orchestra gets involved; ditto the
Yamaha Motif synth, though this does offer occasional colouring during the
recital. Incidentally, you won’t see the Leslie ‘contraption’ in this DVD: it
was stowed under the stage, to be completely isolated for recording, enabling
the organ pitch to be sharpened in post-production, up 2Hz to
the A442 tuning favoured by European orchestras.

The audience
loved every minute: superb music, unexpected sunshine, classy Ledreborg picnic
food, drink served from boats plying the valley’s symmetrical waterways. And –
British festival-goers take note – as they finally picked their contented way to
the shuttle-bus embarkation point, they took all their litter home!

Rather than
resting, Procol repaired to Domus Felix at Lejre, for the fans’ party where many
‘old friends met for the first time’. Amid characteristically generous Danish
hospitality, 120 people celebrated the birthday of Mrs Franky Brooker. And as
well as listening to their own material interpreted by zealous amateurs (over
the weekend two dozen international Palers’ Band members, in various
combinations, tackled 28 different Procoloid compositions, two of them
twenty-minute epics) Procol themselves performed three numbers on the fans’
hired equipment.

Sunday saw
another fantastic sell-out show: it requires little comment, since this DVD
preserves it all. The weather was dry but less bright, and Mark Brzezicki wore
shades only for continuity’s sake, in case cross-edits were needed with the
previous show. As it happens, none of Saturday’s performance has been used … not
even the head flying off the anvil-player’s hammer and spinning
alarmingly through the orchestra!

When this
final, triumphant show was over Procol honoured an invitation to explore the
splendours of Ledreborg Palace (of which only the back is visible from the
concert arena). Geoff recalls his surprise at finding that the Countess was “younger
than us”, and that ‘Milord Carlsberg’ (as Procol had informally dubbed her
consort) was actually a Scotsman named Jock, who immediately asked him for (Tullmeister)
Ian Anderson’s telephone number. The family felt that Count John Ludvig Holstein
(b. 1694), who adopted the Ordine cuncta vigent motto, might have been
“surprised to find 12,500 guests in his back garden,” but would have approved
the way the park and house he created were still playing a significant role in
Denmark's cultural life. Following some ‘Joshing’ at the castle chapel’s 1882
organ (backline-engineer Johnny Magner pedalled the bellows, in the absence of
estate farm-labourers) Procol headed out for a second heady night at Domus
Felix.

The band’s
presence at these fans’ parties transformed the former dairy into a real VIP
Room. This time The Palers backed Gary Brooker on Poison Ivy, at the
launching of a live reunion DVD of his early group, The Paramounts, and Procol
Harum crowned the evening by performing Whaling Stories impromptu with
the midnight fans, all ‘shining up there with the stars’.

Procol’s music
and presence had generated an atmosphere of elevated contentment that no
Ledreborger would ever forget. Jens Hofman, another VIP guest, later wrote to
‘Beyond the Pale’ that “I have never experienced such a cohesiveness and
devotion within a fan club.”

As Procol
Harum: Live at Ledreborg Castle so eloquently demonstrates, Procol Harum
deserve no less.